The film Santoori by the accomplished Iranian director Dariush Mehrjui tells the tale of a drug addict fighting with his inner and outer demons. With a raw and honest look, the film captures the devastation of drug addiction and how a society can push someone in that direction. Santoori an artist vs. society musical drama, goes deep within Tehran’s society, its problems with drugs and the ill treatments of drug addicts.Read More »
A man contemplates life and compares it to a pear tree in his yard which stops producing fruit.
From IMDb:
A quiet gentle film guaranteed to soothe the most jangled nerves with its soft approach to life’s little annoyances and heartbreaks. A writer looks back on his early life as a twelve year old when he lived in a grand mansion and played in the extensive surrounding orchard of fruit trees. I felt like turning off in the first five minutes as the morose writer became more and more depressed with life in general as he struggles for inspiration to write more books and articles. But I’m very glad I kept watching because as he remembers about the happier days of his youth, the dark and shadowy set dissolves into a sun-kissed orchard with a family picnicking under the trees. Read More »
Ali and his father go from their poor neighborhood in the outskirts of the city to a hospital so that Ali’s father can be treated for his sickness. However since they have no money, Ali starts to work for Dr. Sameri who deals in blood.
Awards:
Won Berlin International Film Festival 1978 FIPRESCI Prize (Forum of New Cinema)
Won Berlin International Film Festival 1978 OCIC Award (Forum of New Cinema)
Iran’s submission to the 50th Academy AwardsRead More »
Abolfazl Jalili’s docudrama La Gale (Scabies) is about the painful lives of young offenders who are serving time in the reformatories of post-revolution Iran. Young Hamed, arrested for handing out political tracts banned by the Islamic Republic, finds himself in a place of great suffering, in which illiterate and penniless orphans wash floors and sell their own blood. When a disease breaks out in the prison, his life within this harsh environment becomes progressively worse, a near-daily fight for survival. The film is a searing indictment against a government that failed to deliver the on the promises with which it came to power: to deliver social justice to the oppressed and downtrodden. Initially released in the mid 1980s, at a time when Iran was at war with neighbouring Iraq, the film was an unwelcome edition to the Fajr Film Festival, as its theme of prison life was deemed critical of the Islamic Republic. In a re-edited version, the film was released in 1989 to critical acclaim.Read More »
An engineering student in Iran whose parents fled war-torn Afghanistan. As Afghans are only allowed to have manual-labor jobs in Iran, Taghi plans to move to the motherland he never knew. He faces strong opposition from his parents, who fear for his safety.Read More »
Quote:
Husseyin (Parviz Sayyad), Turkish migrant workers, working in a factory in West Germany. Every day after work, he goes to his home with local subway, where he lives with workers from his country in a residential complex. They are not able to communicate with people and their environment, the have a monotonous life and time of sorrow. one days, Husseyin Roomate , who is tired of his situation, left the complex because of back to his country ….Read More »
The title of “This Is Not a Film” is itself a bitter joke on the illogic of totalitarian thinking. The acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been banned by the state from all filmmaking activities for 20 years and, when we see him in this footage shot in 2011, he’s appealing a six-year prison sentence for “assembling and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security.” He is not allowed to make a film. Therefore, this is not a film.Read More »
This is the debut feature film written and directed by the Iranian born Babak Jalali, presented as a world première in August 2009 at the 62nd Locarno International Film Festival.
FRONTIER BLUES features 4 intertwined stories all set in Iran’s northern frontier with Turkmenistan, a region that has long been neglected in Iranian cinema, interesting not only for its magnificent, forlorn landscape but also for its multi-ethnic population of Persians, Turkmens and Kazakhs.Read More »
“When things are really crap, they will generally get much worse…”
Mokhtar, unable to find work, leaves his wife and child to find employment in more distant lands. After seeing him onto a train we pick up with another man, Marhab, at the end of his journey. The dislocation is such that it takes a while to realise that Marhab has arrived in the same area that Mokhtar has just left. Marhab is also struggling to find and keep work, but still manages to get married in a short space of time – to Mokhtar’s wife (whose former husband is believed dead).Read More »